Posted on 09/25/2005 3:47:51 AM PDT by dennisw
Edited on 09/25/2005 10:11:40 AM PDT by Lead Moderator. [history]
About an hour into Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, Joan Baez—in an interview that will be edited by your PBS station—recalls an invincible young Dylan imagining what they'll be saying about him in the future: "A bunch of years from now, all these (expletive deleted) are going to be writing about all this (expletive deleted) I write, and I don't know where the (expletive deleted) it comes from and I don't know what the (expletive deleted) it's about, and they're going to write about what it's about." Here we are. This documentary comes complete with a Starbucks tie-in, an Apple logo, and a celebrity director's credit. That director is Martin Scorsese, who has surely coveted access to this footage—donated by D.A. Pennebaker, Murray Lerner, and others—having already shot Dylan as the pièce de résistance to his documentary about The Band, The Last Waltz. But before you get too excited about this crossroads meeting, viewer, beware: This project was co-produced by Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen. Scorsese was brought in well after Rosen had already conducted the interviews and approved the material. What will all these assholes be saying about Dylan? In this "Martin Scorsese Picture," whatever the Dylan people want.
We'll take it gratefully, of course. No Direction Home is framed by footage from a 1966 European tour in which Dylan was hounded by the folkie furies for plugging in with the Hawks, who later became The Band. (This footage is from Pennebaker's never-released and seldom-seen Eat the Document.) As the documentary opens, we see Dylan performing the classic rock warhorse "Like a Rolling Stone." The record had already been a No. 2 single, but it was still a rock 'n' roll Rite of Spring, too raw
Dylan: Mediocre talent, Unknown to anyone but aging hippies
Same here. I had not known previously that he was so apolitical, just assumed he was a leftist like all the others, because for all those years I was pretty apolitical myself and paid no attention to the left-wingnuts.
An interesting tidbit that came out in this documentary was that BD said he wanted to go to a military school (he said West Point, but that he could never have gotten in) and maybe die in a far-off land as a soldier. What a shocker coming from someone who I thought was a leftist revolutionary.
Good for Bob that he refused to be a pawn in the left's game.
Check out the live performance of that tune from the 1980 tour.
And here's Saved for an encore.
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